• 26 •

THE PAPERS ALL claimed that Beulah was the last one to see Henry Clay. That must’ve been right, because he took her driving on July 17, 1911, and she told him that it was her birthday.

“It hardly seems possible that I’m nineteen already,” she said as she wrapped a scarf around her hair. He liked an open-topped auto in the summer, no matter how dusty or windy. “It’s just so strange, because in my mind Claudia is always nineteen, but now I’ve caught up to her and Claudia’s a mature and married woman of twenty-three.”

Henry Clay didn’t hear a word she said, he was driving so fast. Since the day they met back up again at the ball park, she’d allowed him to come around and see her once or twice a week. This felt like a triumph, on one hand, because she’d wrestled him away from Louise, but Henry Clay himself had become so unpleasant that it outweighed the sweetness of that small victory.

He was half-crazed over his predicament and obsessed with the idea that he’d been trapped for life. He believed he was, in every meaningful way, already interred in a grave dug for him by his very own family. They had put him in a box and meant to keep him there. Increasingly, Henry Clay saw this not as the sort of warm and comfortable strait-jacket that a well-to-do southern family might wrap around its errant son, but as an active conspiracy, aimed at strangling him quite literally to death.

On their drive that day, he could talk of nothing else. “They do mean to kill me. They mean to crush my spirit and to stifle my soul and then to smother me in the night until I can’t hardly breathe. Why, they’re already doing it. I believe Louise put a pillow over my mouth last night. I woke up gasping for air.”

Beulah was puzzled and a little alarmed by this kind of talk, but also, she had to admit, ever so slightly fascinated. She kept him talking about it.

“Now, why would your own wife do a thing like that, now that y’all have a little baby to bring up?” she said. It stung to even think of the new Beattie baby, but Beulah conjured him up anyway, if only to bring Henry Clay to his senses.

“Don’t you see?” Henry Clay raged. “That’s precisely the reason! She has everything she needs now. A son with the Beattie name, a house to call her own, her share of her parents’ fortune and mine. What purpose do I serve in any of it?”

“Well, what purpose did you expect to serve when you married her?” Beulah said. She was growing tired of all this talk about Louise. She resolved, once again, to refuse to see him the next time he came around. He wasn’t the man she remembered, but she had trouble keeping this newer version of him fixed in her head when he was away. It was only after she’d stepped into his auto that the truth came to her: something had gone seriously wrong with Henry Clay. Or maybe something had been wrong with him all along, only he used to be better at hiding it.

They were on their way to an old stock pond he liked to frequent. It was long abandoned and overgrown with high grass that summer, as there weren’t any cattle on the land anymore. The place was private but not hidden. He explained that he did not like to be sequestered behind a stand of trees. Even a canopy of branches made him feel smothered. Here, on this old dirt road, miles away from any living thing and under an open sky, he could relax.

He stepped out of the auto and stretched out on the grass, not having bothered to bring so much as a blanket for the two of them. Romance was not on his mind. It didn’t matter: Beulah hadn’t had relations with him in some time. He was often ill and feverish, and said he didn’t like to take his clothes off in the daytime, which was the only time he could visit with her. At night he was expected to be at home, “in my place,” as he put it, spitefully, as if there was anything at all wrong with a man being in his own home with his own family in the evening.

He was still muttering about all of this as he stretched out in the grass, but he did not stay there long, and did not call for Beulah to come and lay with him. Instead he was up again, restless, pacing, pleading with Beulah to try to understand him, to see things his way, to help him find a way out of the mess he’d made for himself.

“Her mother knows everything I do,” Henry Clay said, kicking a rock into the mud around the edge of the stock pond. “She knows every step I take when I leave the house. She even knows I’ve been seeing you again.”

“Now, how did she find out about me?” Beulah demanded.

“She’s got somebody following me, I know she does.”

Beulah didn’t like that one bit. She had no interest in tangling with Louise’s mother or anyone else of her ilk. She was living on her own now, working as a laundress, and enjoying a nice quiet life. If Henry Clay wanted to make a mess of his marriage, he ought to do it on his own.

“I have no part in this, and if you were any kind of man, you’d leave me out of it,” Beulah said. “You come by and pull me out of my house, and haul me out here to listen to you rant about your family, as if any of it matters one bit to me. Well, it doesn’t, and you don’t.”

It had been a terrible idea to be out with him like this, all alone in an empty field. What did she hope to gain by running around with him? He’d brought her nothing but trouble and heartache, and that was still all he had to give.

He dropped down on the grass again and pulled at her skirt, as if she would find that enticing. “We had something together, didn’t we? Doesn’t that matter?”

She jerked her skirt away from him. “What did we have? A room in a whorehouse? A baby you threw away? You paid me to go with you, Henry Clay. Did you ever think of that? Whatever we had between us, it was because you paid to have it.”

“Don’t be like that,” he moaned. His eyes were dark and liquid and should’ve moved her to sympathy. They did not.

“Now you’re the one being paid,” she said. “You’re living on your daddy’s money and Louise’s money, and you have to do what they say and act how they say to act, don’t you? How’s that any different than what I had to do for you?” She wrapped her scarf around her hair again and looked down the road, making it obvious that she was thinking about walking off.

Henry Clay was furious. He scrambled to his feet. “Don’t you dare call me a whore.”

Now that word was offensive? Beulah would’ve laughed if she wasn’t so desperate to get away. “Go on back to Louise. Next time you come by, I won’t be at home.”

Was she really going to walk all the way home? How far could it be? She didn’t know, but she’d walk down that old dirt road and take it all the way back into Richmond, if only it carried her away from Henry Clay.

She didn’t look back. She could hear him rummaging around in his automobile. He could chase after her if he wanted to. She wasn’t about to climb back in that machine with him.

For the first time she thought it might’ve been for the best that her baby didn’t live. What if he’d been crazy like his daddy? She wondered how she could’ve missed this side of him before.

It was peaceful, walking down that country lane by herself. Crickets sang in the grass and bumblebees tumbled through the air. She’d only been walking for a few minutes when she heard the shotgun.

She jerked forward as if she’d been hit. Never once had Beulah feared for her life as she did in that moment. She found herself down on the ground, running a hand over her legs, across her shoulder and the back of her head, expecting to find blood. When she determined that she was alive and unhurt, she slumped face-down on the ground, wanting to wrap her arms around the entirety of the earth in gratitude.

Was he still behind her? Don’t turn around, she told herself. But then she did. There he stood, silhouetted against a blazing afternoon sky, with his rifle up over his head, pointed at the heavens.

“Is that what I have to do to get your attention, Beulah Binford?” he shouted, although she could hardly hear him with the wind carrying his voice away.

“Don’t you know you have everyone’s attention, Henry Clay?” she shouted back. “You’re driving everyone around you crazy, including me.”

He put the gun down at his side, but he didn’t make a move toward her, nor she toward him.

“What do you intend to do with that thing?” she called. She stood up on shaky knees and brushed the grass off.

This time his voice was more subdued. “Nothing,” he said. “Just fire it up at the clouds.”

“All right, then, why don’t you put it away? And don’t ever go shooting it off around me again.” She was more afraid than she let on, but she stood her ground, and waited until he went around to the rear of his automobile and put the rifle back where it must’ve been all this time. Beulah hadn’t even suspected that he carried a gun with him.

She walked away again, the dust kicking up into her skirts, thinking that she might pass a farmer going into town who would give her a ride. Henry Clay called after her a few more times, with such sorrow in his voice, but Beulah refused to turn around. He was a haunted man now, governed by his own misery, ruled by demons Beulah couldn’t even fathom. How a man could have everything a person might reasonably want, and still go around so aggrieved and wounded, was something she would never understand.

Just seeing what a wreck he’d made of his life made Beulah want to do something with hers. She would stop chasing after ball players. They were only ever passing through town anyway. It wouldn’t do her any good to try to go to school now, after all this time, but maybe she could find Claudia and ask for help securing some kind of better work for herself.

It had never before occurred to Beulah to imagine what she wanted her life to be, or what kind of person she hoped to become when she was twenty-six like Henry Clay was then. All she knew was that she didn’t want to end up like him.

It was too far for her to walk all the way home. She followed the road quite a ways, until the sun started to sink into a low hill on the horizon. She might’ve kept going in the dark, except that Henry Clay managed to settle himself down eventually and came driving up behind her, slow as he pleased. He asked her very politely to climb back in and let him take her home.

“I won’t bother you again,” he said. “I know you don’t want to see me like this. You won’t. I promise. I’m going to go home and take care of my own mess. You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to see, is my point,” Beulah said.

“I know. I know. You won’t. Just let me take you home. You’ll be out here all night if you keep walking.”

She bent down and squinted at him, and saw how tired he was. He’d worn himself out with all that ranting and raving. There wasn’t any fight left in him.

“All right,” she said, wary but willing. “You take me directly home, and then go put your own house in order.”

“That’s exactly what I intend to do,” Henry Clay said.